Transcript

Robyn Williams:Our next book takes a very different look at the same subject, and a real scientific icon, James Lovelock. The biography is called In Search of Gaia. Here in London with the author John Gribbin is Michele Field. So does Lovelock get upset when attacked for his views?

John Gribbin: Not really, no. I mean, the worst thing you could accuse Jim of is being naïve. He's very open and honest. He speaks his mind. In a sense he's curiously innocent about that, and if he says something and people take offence he's genuinely baffled, and equally he's very puzzled when, as happened years ago, not so much now...I mean, he gets what amounts to personal abuse from especially the evolutionary biologists who called him words like 'crank' for coming up with these ideas and saying he knew nothing about biology, which of course he did.

Michele Field: This is the Richard Dawkins argument?

John Gribbin: Yes, so when Jim's first book was published, his first Gaia book, he presented the idea of the Earth as a single living organism, and this was at a time (though he didn't realise this) when the evolutionary biologists had just won a big battle with a group of people who came up with an idea called group selection which is that a whole group of animals or plants or whatever could evolve together for their mutual benefit, and the Richard Dawkins line is very much the gene is the unit of selection. And so they felt they'd just won this battle about group selection and then here was Jim coming up with what looked like the supergroup, the whole planet, and how can a planet evolve and how can you apply natural selection. And that actually stimulated him to come up with ideas. The most famous one which many people have probably heard of is 'daisy world', of how a single planet can evolve and change and adapt and control its own environment. So he's very happy about this, he says this is how science works, people criticise your ideas, you then refine them and you meet those criticisms, but he was hurt at the time by some of the very personal nature of some of the criticisms by people who didn't appreciate that he wasn't, as I said, just a chemist but he had a background in biology and physiology and medicine as well.

Michele Field: He's become the messenger now warning us about climate change, and he was only a bit player in the 1970s whom a lot of other scientists, as you say, ignored. He did not really even see the weight of his message then, his arguments.

John Gribbin: The important thing...what Jim was interested in to start with was how the Earth regulates its own systems and the feedbacks between living and non-living components of the system which help to maintain the temperature. And it's a problem which has puzzled people for many years, that the Sun started out as a cooler star than it is now. We understand stellar evolution very well, and we know that the Sun was a lot cooler when the Earth was young, and yet the temperature on Earth has stayed more or less the same for billions of years while the Sun has got about 25% hotter. So this was a puzzle, and that was one of the guiding principles behind development of the Gaia idea was to explain this phenomenon which Jim did in terms of the effect of living things on the composition of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide and so on.

But this was before there was a widespread public concern about the increasing level of carbon dioxide caused by human activities and the possibility of a much hotter state. So it was much later on, really the end of the 20th century, the late 1990s, when there was a lot of fuss about this, that Jim began looking at it as an exercise to see if he could test his ideas this way. The way he described it to us is that he went and talked to a lot of people who were working on various aspects of the problem that we know as global warming, and he found that people who were worried about deforestation didn't really understand about melting icecaps, and the people who were worried about melting icecaps didn't understand much about something else.

But as someone with a global view he put these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together and was absolutely horrified by the implications of the broad picture. So that's what led him, when he'd thought he'd retired and was settling down to a quiet life in Devon in his 80s, to come out of retirement and write his previous book about what was happening and how things were much worse than even the scare stories we read in the newspapers are.

Michele Field: Was there a time though when the penny dropped, when he said, 'Everything I know explains everything that's happening'?

John Gribbin: It's not so much that he felt like that about it, it's more a case of a gradual build-up, of an accumulation of evidence that the idea was right, that it is a theory because it has now made predictions that have been tested and proved right, so it's not merely a hypothesis. But the thing that crystallised his thoughts about what's happening to the world and the need to sound a warning note and become almost like an Old Testament prophet now who goes around the world preaching about these ideas was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that came out a couple of years back. And what he did in his earlier book was to take findings of that panel, which are couched in cautious scientific language, and just translate them into everyday language.

There's nothing new in what he's saying, it's all there, it's all been published officially by scientists in respectable journals, in government reports and so on, but he put it in everyday language and in the context of Gaia, and the new ingredient that he has in there is that he sees that instead of a gradual warming which, even the worst scenarios we usually see, they see the temperature going up steadily for a long time and getting worse and worse so we can adapt perhaps, he says that the natural thing to happen for the Earth's system, for Gaia, is to suddenly switch to another state. And in the past this has happened into and out of ice ages, and in the future he predicts that it will happen into a hotter state when the Earth suddenly jumps to a state about five degrees Celsius warmer than it is now, and that could happen very soon.

Michele Field: Let me once more take you back to an important part of Jim Lovelock's career and that was the ozone war in the 1970s where he saw what was happening, and that conflict then between the industrial discharge of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and the pollution of the atmosphere was very politely resolved with legislations and other things. You suggested the problem was workable then because the Americans were behind the law and they banned CFCs. I also got an uneasy feeling that the ease with which we resolved that CFCs problem has maybe led to a nonchalance now about climate change, that we think, oh, we'll pass a few pieces of legislation and it will go away.

John Gribbin: It's certainly true that we've left it rather late because the Americans have only just, with the Obama administration, come on board and started taking the problem seriously. Many individual Americans have been taking it seriously but the government hasn't. I think that it's still true that you need the whole world pulling together to do something about this and there's certainly no room for complacency. The ozone war, as it's sometimes described, was really quite hard-fought, but industry was able to help to do its part.

And something that Jim Lovelock is always very keen to emphasise is that industry isn't evil. You know, it does things to make profits, and if there's a profit to be made out of having a different kind of propellant in a spray can they'll go for that. If there's a profit to be made out of having a kind of energy supply that doesn't release carbon dioxide they'll go for that. So he's certainly a proponent of market forces. So he sees that as being something that can be steered by governments and by legislation, but not by just ordering people about, you have to change the framework within which things work.

One of the key things about the whole ozone story of course is that Jim is this man of many parts. He's an inventor, he was a chemist, and he invents incredibly good instruments, and he had invented something which is called an electron capture device which is...literally you can hold it in the palm of your hand, I've held one at his lab, and it measures tiny, tiny concentrations of almost anything you could choose to measure in the atmosphere.

So he was monitoring the chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs, just to see how they spread around the world, to monitor atmospheric movements, and that was how he discovered that they got all the way to the southern hemisphere and that all the ones that had been made by human activity were still in the atmosphere. Then this led to the discovery that they were damaging the ozone layer and so on. So the understanding of chemistry, the understanding of biology and medicine, that's why all these strands come together and make him the ideal person to talk about the Earth as a single system.

Michele Field: James Lovelock also makes the point, as you say, that the debates cannot remain scientific debates anymore, and you do quote some of the scientists who say that his principles are very good but they do not require the packaging of Gaia. Do you think the public now accepts that the principles are science and Gaia is more than a metaphor?

John Gribbin: I like to think so. The public...I think you mean the scientific public rather than the man in the street, because there are many people out there who treat Gaia as a religion and really that irritates Jim enormously, that they see it...as he puts it, people who have this attitude think that because of this idea that living systems somehow control the environment that Gaia will look after us and make things better. And as he always says, no, Gaia will look after herself and the best thing for her might be to get rid of us. So he's very much opposed to that kind of unthinking faith.

But what's happened is that many, many scientists who don't like the idea of the term 'Gaia' and quite understandably don't like these kind of semi-religious connotations work on exactly the same thing but they now call it Earth system science. And so you'll find references to Earth system science and you could just change that to Gaia, and it doesn't really matter. After all, the word 'Gaia' is from the Greek goddess of the Earth, but it's the same Greek route as the 'geo' in geophysics and geology. They could just as well spelled it 'gaia-ology', gaia-physics', so they're using that word themselves.

Michele Field: But I think it's also brought Jim some appreciation. He shows he has a bit of tenderness for the world. It's a different kind of science.

John Gribbin: He takes a long view, I think that's one of the things that appeals to me. As an astronomer by training I'm not exactly used to thinking in billions of years but it's something that I've come across, and so you think of the whole of the Earth's life as like the life of a single being, and one of Jim's common remarks is that in terms of the age of the Earth until the Sun gets hot and the planet gets too hot to live on and his own age (he's 90 this year), he sees himself as being about the same stage through his life that Gaia is, which is a nice analogy.

But what he says is that Gaia will survive, we may not. Human beings will probably survive, our kind of civilisation may not, this is his line. But in a million years time, say, there may be people, there may not be people, there will still be a planet, there will still be life on the planet, so there will still be Gaia. And this doesn't mean that he's hard-hearted, he's a warm, affectionate human being who loves his kids and his grandchildren and all of that stuff, but it is a different perspective and it's one that I share, so I feel a sort of bond through being an astronomer and having this long view with him.

Michele Field: The Gaia principle in that sense must also apply to other planets.

John Gribbin: The way Jim got into the whole thing, what gave him the spark of insight about Gaia was through his work with NASA, one of his other many roles, as a consultant on missions that were planned to go to Mars in the 1960s, unmanned space probes. The NASA people were interested in designing instruments to look for traces of life on Mars, and while working on this project Jim had this insight which was like a revelation, a sudden flash of insight that there's no need to go and look for traces because you could tell by looking at the atmosphere, because the Earth's atmosphere contains oxygen, obviously, and other highly reactive substances, and if there was no life on Earth, quite quickly those would all get used up, they'd be locked away in things like carbon dioxide which are very stable. So he said if we look at the atmosphere of Mars and we see it's made of carbon dioxide, there's no life there, because life requires this active, constantly changing kind of environment.

And sure enough, a short time later some French astronomers looked at Mars and Venus with what were then new techniques in observational astronomy and found they both had carbon dioxide atmospheres. So it's no surprise that the space probes haven't found anything. The NASA people were not keen on Lovelock promoting this idea in the 1960s because it would have removed their justification for their expensive lovely toys to go to Mars. The irony is that now people are very interested in finding other Earths orbiting other stars, and the technology that NASA is now promoting vigorously to do this is to put very expensive satellites up to use infrared telescopes to look at the atmospheres of these planets and see if they've got carbon dioxide or if they've got things like oxygen, ozone in the atmosphere. The Lovelock test is now accepted as the way to tell if a planet is alive from light years distance.

Michele Field: It's fascinating, but what happens to the theory when we do find more Gaias? How do we just think that Gaia is infinitely definable?

John Gribbin: Yes, it's exactly like other living things in that sense. If you find one bird on an island then you find another bird, you're not surprised, and astronomers talk about the life zone around a planet. Now, we only know about our kind of life, so we leave out the science fiction ideas about strange aliens breathing methane or whatever it might be, and we look for planets that are the right distance from their parents' star to have liquid water because that seems to be the criterion.

Even within our solar system people consider the possibility that there could be life on some of the moons of the outer planets. There are moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn where there are possibilities of life, one in particular where the entire crust seems to be an ice layer floating on what must be liquid and is probably liquid water, and so there's speculation that there could be life in that ocean which would be very different from our form of life. So in a sense that would be a mini Gaia.

So I think this is something that's becoming very respectable, partly driven (to be crude about it) by the imperative to get funding for your research, it's always good to jump on a bandwagon, but not entirely so, it is a genuine scientific endeavour. And of course arguably it would be the most significant scientific discovery of all time if we found life somewhere else, even if it's just microbes. You know, the fact that we're not unique would be an incredible discovery.

Michele Field: Lovelock also speaks of Gaia having a will of its own. For instance, he says Gaia may prefer cooler conditions, even ice age conditions, to the climate we have today. 'Prefer' in the sense that more biological activity would take place under some conditions than others.

John Gribbin: Exactly.

Michele Field: Can we speak of Gaia having preferences?

John Gribbin: No, he's being naughty there and he knows it, and this is why people jump on him from a great hight and tell him off. He's using this as a metaphor. It's like when people talk about Mother Nature or something, he's not saying that there is any kind of sentience or planning involved in this at all. This is a process like natural selection that's led to the evolution of ourselves, it's a random process which does operate by selection.

The 'daisy world' example is one perhaps worth giving here. This is the basic explanation of how a planet can stay warm, and it's what's called a thought experiment but the fact that it works shows that there are mechanisms like this. The idea is you have a planet that's just like the Earth, the same distance from its parents' star and it's got two kinds of daisies, no other form of life, living on its surface, black daisies and white daisies. And you start running your computer model with the cool sun, the way we think the Sun was, and get it hotter and hotter and hotter, and very simply white daisies reflect heat and black daisies absorb heat.

And what happens is that as the sun warms up, more heat comes to the planet and more white daisies spread across the planet reflecting the heat because that makes things better for life. You have a band of temperatures in which the daisies flourish. And when the sun is cool black daisies flourish, and when the sun is hot white daisies flourish, and the temperature of the planet stays the same for a very, very long time while the temperature of the star goes up by 25%, 30%.

Now, that shows that it works, and so you have all these mechanisms...you mentioned a warm blooded animal keeps warm partly by shivering, partly by eating food which is then burned very slowly, partly by running about if you get too cold, and the Earth has lots of mechanisms that work not in a thoughtful way, you don't have to think to yourself 'I'm cold, I'd better shiver', it just happens. And people who shiver and keep warm have survived better during the cold times and so they have most children and so on, the way evolution works.

Michele Field: The Australians have another example, I found in your book, that they looked at the Great Barrier Reef and they found an algal mucus that's exuded by the coral that contains this high concentration of DMS that is the highest DMS on the planet and it means...well, you tell me what it means. DMS is the means by which sulphur escapes into the atmosphere, am I right? Why is this important?

John Gribbin: This is one of the key things in converting, if you like, a lot of people to accepting Gaia as a meaningful idea, or Earth system science, whatever they want to call it. There's been a puzzle for a long time about how clouds form over the oceans, and you think it's easy, you know, evaporation, water gets up there, clouds form. But that's not the way it works. Clouds need little tiny particles called condensation nuclei to form little tiny drops of water, otherwise if there are none of these condensation nuclei you get big drops of water and they just fall straight back into the sea. To make clouds you need little tiny drops of water formed around these particles, and Lovelock suggested that this comes from this DMS, dimethyl sulphide, which is released by bacteria, biological organisms in the sea, and gets into the atmosphere and then that's carried over onto the land and falls there and runs off and gets back and so on. And it turned out that he's right.

Many people were very impressed by this because it solved a long-standing problem. And then more recently, I think it was about ten years ago, this discovery was made that the Great Barrier Reef produces this very high concentration of DMS which is what Lovelock claimed was making cloud cover over the oceans. And the importance of this is that of course if the world gets hotter, the biological activity increases, everything flourishes, and that makes more clouds, and the clouds reflect sunlight so things cool off. And if the world cools down, biological activity decreases and there are fewer clouds and so more sunlight gets through so the world warms up again. So it's part of this natural thermostat, one of the processes like shivering, that keeps Gaia at the same temperature.

So when people found all this stuff in the Great Barrier Reef, they thought, well, what's it doing to the clouds above the reef? And then more recently a team from Southern Cross University have looked very closely at this and they've found that coral is producing this stuff more strongly when it gets hotter, if the sea temperature increases, or if the ultraviolet radiation increases, and the suggestion is that this makes more clouds over the reef which protects it from the thing that's causing the stress. And it's come both at just the right time and the wrong time because it's a key discovery about a Gaian mechanism that people want to study in more detail but there's a bit of a race against time because, as I'm sure people listening know, the reef is in danger because of global warming.

So the coral is dying off, it's reached a stress point where this mechanism can no longer protect it. And that is, again, an example in miniature of Lovelock's warning about the whole world. Things stay protected as long as they can, and then when they fail they fail and you jump to a completely different state, and this is what he suggests will happen to the reef; if it gets much warmer, the coral will die, and so once the coral dies this mechanism stops so there's less cloud cover so it gets even hotter. And you then go from a negative feedback stabilising things to a positive feedback making things worse, and instead of the coral dying off slowly over 10, 20, 30 years the way other people predict, he sees a tipping point coming when it can no longer protect itself and, bang, it's all gone in a year or two.

Michele Field: It sounds like we should take algae and put it in other places and keep it growing for us.

John Gribbin: This is something else, Jim Lovelock is not averse to considering the possibility of technology to get us over the short-term. In the long-term we have to do many things, we have to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we have to somehow reduce the population. Obviously a lot of this problem is because there are so many people in the world having such a big impact.

But, as he says, some of the short-term fixes people might not like. He's a strong advocate of nuclear power to replace coal in the short-term, strange ideas for cloud seeding...it's technically possible. For years we've been taking sulphur out of the fuel used in jet aircraft to make them cleaner and, as I said, it's sulphur in this DMS that makes the clouds, and he says you could actually add sulphur that if you're flying around the world you're actually spreading clouds and helping to cool the world down.

That's a slightly outrageous idea but, as he says, if you need a kidney transplant and you couldn't get one, you wouldn't refuse dialysis to be going on with while you're waiting for a proper long-term solution. So he says, some of these ideas, some are crazy, some are not so crazy, but for the kind of investment involved in testing them, they're worth testing to see if they could be the dialysis that gets us through until a proper solution comes along.

Michele Field: But at the end of your book you remind us about this experiment in Arizona, the biosphere, as though we thought we could create a capsule that was sustainable, with plants and animals and so on, as people might have to do if they set up a human colony on the Moon or someplace. But this experiment failed. Creating a Gaia from our knowledge is just not possible yet.

John Gribbin: No, what we need to do is to live with Gaia and understand the systems, this is Lovelock's message, and I think a very good example of this is people who have many well-meaning ideas like planting trees...these schemes that you can offset your carbon footprint by planting new forests, it's much better to preserve old forest, and there is a scheme where you can contribute and put money in to buy a bit of the tropical rainforest and so the people who are running this buy large chunks of rainforest and leave it alone. And he says that's the way to do it, you work with Gaia.

We could never recreate the Amazonian jungle, all the plants, insects, birds and trees that you need to make that living ecosystem, and if we go out planting rows and rows of pine trees in wherever it is, that's never going to do the same job. So we have to do two things; we have to learn to live with Gaia and, uncomfortable though many people are in even mentioning the point, we have to have fewer people on the planet, and if we don't do it ourselves, Gaia will do it to us, that's his message.

Michele Field: I think James Lovelock's estimate is it's about one-seventh of the population we have now that could manage to survive in a better world. Can any government accept this as inevitable? Can they plan for it?

John Gribbin: I don't think so, and I don't think Lovelock does either. He says you should prepare for the worst, basically, and certainly if you live in a country like Australia that could be very bad because large parts of the country are arid or semiarid and we've all seen what happens with the bush fires and so on. And places like Britain he says will be a very nice place to live in the warmer world, but the snag is everybody else will want to come and live there as well. So he doesn't see any easy path to the future, although, again, taking the long view, if you come back in 1,000 years time perhaps there'll be a nice, pleasant planet with about a billion people living on it and having a nice life and looking back on us as the dark ages.

Michele Field: Gaia is not going to be there producing more minerals, more resources for them, even for one billion people.

John Gribbin: This is another point that Lovelock makes. There's a very interesting question about intelligence in the universe and whether there's life on other planets and so on. It takes geological time to lay down all the resources that we're using up, not just the carbon that makes the carbon dioxide that's heating the world but the metal in their cars and whatever. It may be that technological civilisation only gets one chance on a planet and you either get it right first time or you've had it and it's back to living in caves or wooden huts or whatever. But who's to say that's not a viable, pleasant way of life? I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have told you they had a very nice civilisation and they were very happy with it and probably couldn't have envisioned anything much better. So if everybody is living that kind of lifestyle, whatever few people there are in 1,000 years time, it's not really for us to say that they're worse off than we are, they may regard us as barbarians.

Michele Field: But that description suggests that Gaia and technology are at odds in some way, that technology is not part of Gaia.

John Gribbin: They're only at odds because we're misusing it. We're a very young species and we're like a kid in a toy shop...I'm guilty of it myself, I see a new mobile phone and I think, oh, it's great, and it's got a bigger screen and it's got GPS and, wow! And we don't need all this stuff. If you sit back and think about it, we just don't need all this stuff, and a more mature civilisation would probably not need two cars, wouldn't need one car maybe. So it is our own fault, we're too greedy and we're like spoiled kids, and maybe one day we'll grow up.

Michele Field: I kept thinking while reading your book that Lovelock is a lot like Noah, like the Old Testament story fits so well to this. He makes the point that you can't escape the transformations that are ahead, and perhaps there are options we can choose to make life more liveable for that one billion people who will be left to cope once they get off the Ark. But you write also that the rate at which species are being lost now is faster than at any time in the history of the Earth. Psychologically, can we cope with that, being a surviving species with the losses?

John Gribbin: To put that in perspective, when geologists look at the fossil record, they look back over the four billion years or so of Earth's history, there have been five occasions where there has been massive loss of life on Earth for reasons which may be a giant meteor striking the Earth, which is probably what killed off the dinosaurs. There have been five of these so-called great extinctions when more than 50% of all the species are gone in a geological eye blink which means less than a million years. And the rate we're going, we're producing the same kind of mass extinction on a shorter time scale. So it will be the sixth great extinction, and it's happening for sure, all these species that are going. Each time the Earth recovers, Gaia recovers, if you like. The dinosaurs go and the mammals come, and similar things have happened in the past. Possibly what we're doing is so bad that it will be the end of the mammals and something else will arise when we're looking in 10, 20 million years time. It may be that we're seeing the end of our era the way 65 million years ago was the end of the era of the dinosaurs.

Michele Field: Is there anybody who can step into his shoes? Are there younger scientists who have this...whatever it is?

John Gribbin: Of course we've been mainly talking about Gaia but the book is half about Gaia and half about his life and how he got to be this unusual person, and his background is very unusual, and the simplest way to describe it is that he is an independent scientist in both meanings of the term. He's not affiliated with a university or any other kind of academic institute, and for 40 years he's worked from his home, from his own lab, so he's free to say what he likes and offend anyone he likes and he won't lose his job because he hasn't got a job, and that suits his personality as well, and is why he's able to come up with new ideas. This kind of life is much harder to lead now. Scientists work in large teams, they work in universities, it's hard to get your scientific papers published unless you've got a respectable address to publish from.

There is no individual that I know of that's capable of picking up the baton, as it were, and carrying on where he leaves off. I think we have to see it more as a progression into the state where, whether you call it Gaia theory or Earth system science, it is now respectable. And there are those teams of people who are doing the kind of work that's necessary to make it understood better and to help us, as I say, not to try to control the Earth but to live within the Earth's system. It sounds, when you put it like that in a sort of hippy, green philosophy, you know, 'we've got to live with nature', but really we do have to, but not in a hippy, green way, although I've got lots of hippy, green friends. We have to do it in a thinking, scientific, technological way. There are better technologies than burning coal in power stations to make electricity to watch TV, for example.

Robyn Williams: John Gribbin. His book James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia is just out, and he was talking to Michele Field in ABC London.